Hi Nerve crew,

Hope you all had a restful long weekend. It’s Sarah here, welcoming you to our Tuesday edition, where we’re bringing you a wonderful interview with the nation’s leading psychotherapist – and Nerve cultural agony aunt – Philippa Perry, this week’s hotlist and a column bearing the cheery news that Donald Trump is the best thing to happen to the global renewable energy drive in recent memory (shhh, nobody tell him).

On which note… we have a major announcement! Just over six months in, and thanks to the many, many of you who are paying members (🙏), the Nerve is expanding! We are thrilled to tell you about four more journalists joining the team: two brilliant young investigative reporters and two big-name columnists. 

Lucia Osborne-Crowley, the author of three books including The Lasting Harm, a survivor-centred, award-winning account of the Ghislaine Maxwell trial, joins as investigative reporter and feature writer. We were blown away by an onstage interview Lucia did at the Nerve-partnered Laugharne festival in March, in which she described queuing in the wee small hours of the Manhattan winter every day during the trial in order to be one of the four journalists admitted to the courtroom, and the stories of intimidation following her reporting. Lucia is the very definition of having nerve (and, in a lovely full-circle moment, she reminded Jane and I that when she was a 21-year-old fledgling journo, she flew from Australia to do a two-week internship with us on the Observer New Review).

Also building out the investigations desk is Alice McCool, an excellent investigative reporter who has written about dark money flows into UK organisations – particularly those linked to gender and LGBTQ issues – and joins from the Good Law Project. Alice has also done much important work in the field of environmental reporting, winning the 2022 Press Gazette/British Journalism Innovation of the Year award for helping build a data platform that tracks corporate greenwashing and climate disinformation.

Switching to the Nerve opinion “desk”, we are delighted to have signed Sangita Myska and Cory Doctorow. Sangita is a stellar, hugely respected broadcaster with many years’ experience at the BBC and LBC, and has been completely fearless in her fact-based, deeply researched approach to covering Gaza and the rise of Britain’s far right. She will be writing twice a month as our political commentator; expect more nerves-of-steel analysis of the behaviour of Nigel Farage, for starters. 

Joining us as a monthly tech columnist is the Toronto-born, LA- and London-based cyber-activist Cory Doctorow, who coined the term “enshittification” and is hands down the most insightful voice on technology on the internet. Think of Cory as your brainbox cousin here to guide us normies in the family through the history, context and technical complexities of the online world. His first column – linked below – joins the dots between Trump’s unhinged behaviour and clean energy, and is a great taster of what’s to come.

We’re so excited about the new additions, we made a quick reel to celebrate… (sorry to link to X, for tech reasons that’s the only platform we can share on this newsletter).

Philippa Perry is an author, an artist, an agony aunt on Substack, and writes a monthly column for the Nerve. She has also found the time to write a debut novel – the appropriately titled Shrink Solves Murder – billed as  “a warm, witty and wise crime caper”. To mark the book’s publication, Philippa spoke to writer Ursula Kenny for the Nerve Q&A. Here’s a taster: “I had, like everybody else, a disastrous first marriage, but you learn a lot. You've got to have your failures in order to know how to succeed, haven't you? I look back on it quite fondly, almost…” Read the full interview here.

In the first of a new regular column for the Nerve, the author and cyber-campaigner Cory Doctorow hails an unlikely radical driving the green revolution: Donald Trump. The US president’s not doing it on purpose, of course, but by dumping all America’s unwanted solar-energy hardware on Asia, and then denying the world oil through the strait of Hormuz, he has turbocharged a global rush away from fossil fuels. Now we live in a world where bridal dowries in Pakistan routinely include solar panels and Australians bid for scarce electric cars sight unseen. As Cory writes: “The world is going to install unimaginable amounts of cleantech. The fortunes that fossil fuel companies are reaping from the current shortage is their last windfall.” Read his column here.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 may have had a dressing-down from some, but our resident film buff Ellen E Jones gives it the full thumbs up in this week’s Hotlist, saying it “arrives with the confident strut of the Runway team entering a Milan fashion week party”. Also striding confidently into view are two hot new stage productions: Ava Pickett’s riotous female-led Tudor drama 1536 hits London’s West End, while in Scotland, Stand & Deliver: The Lee Jeans Sit-in turns the 1981 strike at Greenock’s Lee Jeans factory into an exhilarating musical. Or, if you prefer, turn up your speakers to 11 and blast out the Irish punk-rap trio Kneecap raging against the establishment on their album Fenian. All this and more in this week’s hotlist.

Thanks for reading! We’ll be back again on Friday,

Sarah